The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Digital image management applications may be used to manage a collection of digital images. Digital image management applications may be used to store and retrieve digital images to and from a storage medium, such as a hard drive. However, some digital image management applications are limited on how many digital images they can manage because all of the digital images managed by the application must be stored on the storage medium. As a result, the number of digital images that a digital image management application can manage may be limited by the size of the storage medium.
Certain digital image management applications may also be used to perform an edit operation on a digital image that causes a change in a visual characteristic of the digital image. When an application performs an edit operation on a digital image, the application typically creates, based on the existing digital image, a new digital image that reflects the performance of the edit operation. Thus, after performing the edit operation, not only is the prior digital image stored on the storage medium, but also the new digital image that reflects the performance of the edit operation. Consequently, editing digital images in this manner exacerbates the limitations of a digital image management application as ample space must be available on the storage medium to store, in addition to the original digital images, the results of any edit operations performed on the digital images managed by the digital image management application.